Carpet Conundrum

Making design decision  is supposed to be fun.  Sigh.  It's not.  Home Depot came out and measured our house for carpet, so all we had to do was pick one.  Avery had his favorite:

C'mon folks, red shag is awesome!!

 But for the ones with the credit cards, we were trying to decide between loop and twist.  As you might know, or might be able to gather, loop carpet is exactly that, it's carpet where the pieces are looped down.  Something like this:

Throw rug for me for a loop!  Cheesy.

See how all that sticks up are the curved parts of the loop?  The great thing about loop carpet is that it's really durable, which we like, because we'll inevitably be renting this place out.  We also personally like this because we feel it looks a little more grown-up and neater than twist carpet.  The downsides of loop carpet are that it's usually not as soft as twist carpet.  Additionally, and a HUGE deal for us is that cute little kitty cats like to dig their claws into carpet (as we all know).  One they un-loop a looped piece, you can't loop it again, so it becomes obvious that the carpet has been slightly damaged.  We have a cat with claws, and we'd like to be able to rent out the townhouse to people with pets, because the DC area seems to have very few pet-friendly places to rent.

Twist carpet is your more traditional carpet, where each pieces ends sticking up.  Like so:

Come on baby, let's do the....ok, I'm stopping.

Twist carpet is softer on your toes than loop carpet, but less durable.  It also shows the indent of beds/dressers a lot more than loop carpet does.  But, if a cat scratches it, you can just trim it down and you're back to new.

So, what's a couple to do but try to make these two carpets have a little carpet baby and combine them?  Enter "Pattern" carpet.  Oooooooooohhhhh.

No joke here.  I promised to stop. 

Yep, it's a pattern.  The lighter parts aren't really lighter, they are looped.  The darker parts aren't really darker, they are twist.  It's kind of best of both worlds, so we liked it, but we didn't like the actual pattern.  I didn't necessarily want shells or leaves or squares or something all over my floor.  So here's what we found at the HD (Home Depot).

A trio of pattern carpet

This is the "Insightful" line.  They are numbered (from the top) I, II, and III.  Roman numerals means they are fancier.  And you can see that each pattern carpet has its own pattern.  We studied these a lot:

And we really liked the "Insightful III" which had the least amount of patten in it.  Still a loop/twist combo, but it didn't make such a distinctive squares pattern all over the floor.  Basically, more twists than loops, and scattered instead of placed in a pattern.  So it won't look too patterned, but will still give us some of the benefits of the loop.  And the best part?

On sale!  Sure, 22 cents doesn't seem like a lot, but when you're carpeting stairs, a hall, and three upstairs bedrooms, all those 22 cent increases count, so we will take what we can get.  Now it was down to color.

That's a lotta beige!

Avery was still holding out for the red, but we were looking at something that didn't make such a bold statement.  Luckily, HD had replenished their dwindling supplies of laminate samples, so we grabbed a sample of the laminate that we bought for our hard woods to just hold it next to the carpet samples.

And Linen wins!  We are going for a very neutral, but warm-neutral look in our new place, and we really liked how these floors complimented each other.  (The laminate is "Highland Hickory" from HD).  From there, all that was left to do was pick a padding.  My work was pretty much done, so Jon and the HD guy talked it over and we went with the Nike (yep, like the shoes) padding.

In case you didn't know, it's a step ahead.  It's also got ground up pieces of shoes or something in it.  Anyway, add another 69 cents a square foot to our bill.  This will make our stairs and bedrooms feel nice and soft to step on in the morning.  Or any time of day, really.

With the decisions made, the order went in!  Now we just wait for the carpet to come in, the guys to call us to schedule installation, and the date to arrive when we get to flood our house with that awesome new carpet smell - yay!!